Truepic achieves native integration of secure photo capture on a smartphone

GaryPageau
Truepic Foresight camera secure mode

Truepic Inc. announced the company successfully achieved the world’s first native integration of hardware-secured photo capture in a prototype mobile device, powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 5G Mobile Platform. The device produces photos with cryptographically-sealed provenance data whose authenticity can be verified by recipients. The company says the device helps prevent the spread of deceptive photos and videos.

“The world is digitizing most human interactions, a trend that has only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Jeff McGregor, CEO of Truepic. “Simultaneously, we have seen rapid growth in visual deception, fraud, and disinformation online. These two trends cannot safely co-exist without a trust mechanism to help protect those capturing and viewing images. Today’s announcement represents the future of digital imagery on the internet—and a scalable, long-term solution to the problem of visual deception online.”

The Foresight capability is accessible through a new “Secure” capture mode in the device’s native camera app. Engaging this mode and pressing the capture button produces a digital photo that contains cryptographically-sealed provenance data, formatted in accordance with emerging open standards. The data allows a recipient to authenticate the pixels, date and time, geolocation, and 3D depth map.

This technology was achieved with the new Truepic Foresight system, the hardware-secured version of the company’s Controlled Capture technology. Truepic integrated Foresight into the Snapdragon 865 reference design, taking advantage of the underlying hardware security. The Truepic Foresight system features:

  1. The Truepic Foresight trusted application firmware for the Qualcomm Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) of Snapdragon 865
  2. The Truepic Foresight middleware for the Android operating system
  3. The Truepic Foresight Certificate Authority cloud service
  4. A modified version of the device’s native camera app

“This development paves the way for visual content consumers to determine the trustworthiness of photos and accurately discern authentic versus forged content,” said Manvinder Singh, Vice President, Product Management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.  “We are pleased that Snapdragon is providing the platform on which this crucial deepfake countermeasure is being developed.”